


In Red, Underlined

by Butterfly



Series: Scenes from a Resurrection Story [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Gen, Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn (mentioned/minor), the mcd is actively trying to undo his current status
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 15:17:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18625876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfly/pseuds/Butterfly
Summary: Penny gets a headache.





	In Red, Underlined

**Author's Note:**

> Still dealing with the aftermath of 4x13, so content warning for talking about suicide.

“I just feel so stupid,” Kristine Jamison McDonald muttered again, viciously running a hand through her bouncy brunette curls. She'd said it seventeen times so far in her preliminary interview. She'd done the hair thing eleven times. “A bear. Who gets eaten by a fucking _bear_ these days?”

“Yeah, it's relatively rare, but it does happen.” Penny kept his face composed and his voice soothing, but it was getting harder.

( _when you go walking in the woods alone at night, carrying a shit-ton of food 'just in case', and literally stumble down a cliff and into a bear den, yeah, lady, you might get eaten by a damn bear_ )

Mostly, he was glad that she didn't _look_ like she'd gotten eaten by a bear. That would make this whole thing even worse. He repressed a shiver. “The next question is whether or not you feel ready to confess a secret or if you want to wait a while until it's time for you to move on.”

“Ugh.” She slumped in her chair, and she was- was she pouting? She was. She was pouting. “Is my dad still down here or did he...?” She flicked her hand as if tossing out trash.

“He's here,” Penny said, his fingers tapping against his desk rhythmically.

“Pfft. Well. I guess I have some things I could say to _him_ ,” Kristine said, and then she proceeded to tell Penny, for a good twenty minutes, all the things that she wanted to say to her father. He couldn't argue that she was wrong about any of it – the guy had definitely been a deadbeat dad, had definitely been unreliable, yeah, that all checked out. It was just... hard for him to focus.

( _I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time_ )

“-kind of father does that on his daughter's birthday! The first birthday that I'd invited him to in ten fucking years-”

( _honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time_ )

“Wait a second, is that Taylor Swift?”

Penny blinked. “What?”

“That's a Taylor Swift song,” Kristine said, sitting up straight, even her glasses quivering in indignation. “I'm sorry, were you so bored by me that you were singing _Taylor Swift_ instead of actually listening to what I was telling you?”

“I wasn't- _what_?” But now that he was focusing, he could hear it. Not his thoughts, but...

Well, shit. That was a complication.

Penny focused in on Kristine and managed to get her the fuck out of his office and on her own way in less than ten minutes. Then he leaned against his desk, reached out and...

(- _and queens, you traded your baseball cap for a crown_ -)

“Fuck you, Quentin Coldwater,” Penny said, with feeling.

Then he followed the damn music in his head.

It didn't lead him down to the doorway where Quentin had passed on – and Penny had _seen_ him go through and no one was supposed to be able to come back from that – but instead stayed in the underworld Library proper and went deeper and deeper into the stacks. Bookshelf after bookshelf, passing by the long-dead, until he found what he was looking for, at the far end of an aisle, sitting down with at least seven messy stacks of book around him:

Quentin Makepeace Coldwater, muttering to himself as he flipped through the pages of a book, and _still_ fucking singing in his head.

“You're giving me a headache, asshole,” Penny said, hoping for at least a flinch of surprise, but Quentin just glanced up and smiled that barely-there smile of his, the music cutting out instantly.

“Took your time,” he said. “I thought I was gonna have to run through her entire catalog.”

“Do you really know her entire fucking- never mind, I don't care,” Penny said, rubbing at his head. “What the hell, man? How'd you get back out? That was supposed to be a one-way trip.”

 _Now_ he got that flinch he'd been expecting, but it didn't give him any joy to see it.

“Do you know what's on the other side of that door?” Quentin tossed his book down onto a stack of other books. Penny tilted his head slightly to read the covers, but he didn't recognize any of the titles. What was Quentin researching here?

“Your door? Nope. It's not covered in your book,” Penny said, with a shrug. “It was... bad?”

“It was _hell_ , Penny. Not a normal hell, but my hell,” Quentin said, pulling a handful of blank papers – no, they weren't blank, it looked like he'd actually torn out pages that had as little text as possible so that he could use them for notes. He scribbled a few words down on one page, flipped it over to the other side and added some words there, too. “Quentin fucking Coldwater, all by himself, alone with his own useless, _bullshit_ thoughts. Anyway, I decided it could all go fuck itself, and found the doorway again and, well, here I am.”

“Here you are,” Penny repeated, feeling fairly useless himself. He'd gotten – he was a little ashamed of this – but he'd actually felt kinda good about all the praise he'd gotten over how well ( _how quickly_ ) he'd handled everything with Quentin. Proud of, apparently, sending his friend to stew in his own dark thoughts for eternity. God. “But that means... that means...”

Quentin shot him a quick, quizzical look, then yanked a book out – from the middle of one of his horribly-balanced piles – and started scanning through the pages, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “That means?”

“Shit, you really did commit suicide,” Penny said, and he had to lean against one of the bookshelves. A heroic sacrifice, that was what it had said in Quentin's own fucking book. Except. Well. It had been pretty sparse on words at the end, pared down to the barest essentials, like only half of Quentin's soul was paying attention to anything around him and the rest was just running on autopilot.

“Yeah, I really did,” Quentin said, running his finger down a line of text. “Also, jeez, there's a punishment for suicide? That's fucked up. That's really fucked up. Why are you still toeing the company line down here, huh, Penny? Why aren't you starting a goddamn revolution like your girlfriend did upstairs?”

“That's a cheap shot,” Penny said, but he couldn't... he couldn't disagree. “I'll think about it.” After another quiet moment, he added, “It's not supposed to be a punishment.”

Quentin snorted. And, yeah. He couldn't really disagree with that either, not after all the looks he'd gotten into Quentin's head over the years. “Anyway, can you take a message to the others? I need to let them know I'm trying to come back.”

“You can't-”

“Bullshit,” Quentin said, tossing his most recent book aside with a thud. “I'm not going to let one shitty moment define the rest of my life. Death. Whatever. I wasn't even- I wasn't-” He grabbed at his papers and scribbled some more lines down. The ink shone oddly in the light of the library. Conjured, maybe? “I wasn't _done_.”

“That's how I felt, too, when I first-”

“Zelda let you die – did you know that?” Quentin flexed his fingers and did a quick tut, yanking another book off the nearby shelf. “I heard the gossip about that before I... before everything happened. She had a cure for the poison and she let you die.”

“I know,” Penny said, quietly. “Not at the time, but I read her book a while back. I get why she did it.”

“I'm just saying, maybe we can do something about your contract too, while I'm working on my own exit,” Quentin said. “I'll look.”

“You don't have to-”

“I'm gonna. And if I find something, then you'll actually have a _choice_ about what to do.” Quentin ripped a page out of the book and Penny flinched a little. “So, maybe we can make a deal? You make sure no one catches me down here, take a message to our friends, and I'll see if I can help you while I'm helping myself?”

“Okay,” Penny said. “Deal. Who- who do you want me to tell?”

Quentin hesitated, some kind of struggle clearly visible on his face.

“Julia,” he said, finally. “Tell Julia.”

“Not Alice? I know you two got back together, just before everything went down.”

Quentin's mouth twisted slightly, but his wards weren't letting anything through now. “Not- yeah, not Alice. Just tell Julia. She'll let the others know. She's... she probably figured out what I did. The others might not have. So. So she should know first. That way, she won't- it won't- I know she was always worried that I would- yeah.”

“Julia, got it,” Penny said. “I'll try to see if anyone else here knows you came back from beyond. I'm not helping with the research, though. I've got an actual job.”

Quentin waved a hand dismissively, head already turning back down to another book.

Penny backed away, and then headed off to do some investigating. It would be... complicated... getting a message to Julia without anyone finding out about it, but he could make it happen.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do".


End file.
